HACKENSACK, N.J. – Remote and video-enabled health care is becoming a critical cornerstone of health care delivery, according to a study released recently by Vidyo, Inc., a provider of embedded video technology.

The study showed that 75% percent of respondents currently operate or plan to launch telehealth services in the year to come.

“Telehealth has officially gone mainstream,” said Elana Anderson, chief marketing officer of Vidyo, in a statement. “Our research shows that the rates at which providers are adding video services to their medical bags will make 2018 the year that ‘telemedicine’ becomes standard medicine and mobile or remote access becomes the new normal.”

According to the study, telehealth ranks as one of the top four IT investment priorities for health systems and two-thirds of respondents plan to spend 20% or more of their technology budget on telemedicine solutions. Respondents cited improved patient outcomes and cost prevention as key drivers of telehealth adoption and more than 60% of those surveyed reported better-than-expected results from current telehealth solutions, noting improvements in efficiency, timeliness of care and patient health.

MADISON, Wis. – A team of researchers from the Wisconsin Institute of Surgical Outcomes Research at the University of Wisconsin have developed a smartphone app that enables patients to remotely send images of their surgical wounds for monitoring by nurses.

The WoundCare app was developed to aid in earlier detection of surgical site infections and reduced hospital readmissions.

“Many SSI develop in the post-discharge period and are inadequately recognized by patients,” wrote Dr. Rebecca Gunter, lead author of a study on the development of the app that was published recently in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

For the study, researchers enrolled 40 vascular surgery patients during their inpatient stay. They were trained to use the WoundCare app, which allowed them to transmit digital images of their surgical wound and answer a survey regarding their recovery. Following hospital discharge, participants completed the app daily for two weeks, and providers on the inpatient team reviewed submissions daily and contacted patients for concerning findings.

The research team detected seven wound complications with one false negative. Participant and provider satisfaction was universally high, according to the study results.

“Patients and their caregivers are willing to participate in a mobile health program aimed at remote monitoring of postoperative recovery, and they are able to complete it with a high level of fidelity and satisfaction,” wrote Gunter. “Preliminary results indicate the ability to detect and intervene on wound complications.”

LOS ANGELES — Proof is lacking that wearable biosensors are improving patient outcomes like blood pressure and weight, according to a study by researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

The study was published in a recent issue of the new Nature Partner Journal, npj Digital Medicine.

“As of now, we don’t have enough evidence that they consistently change clinical outcomes in a meaningful way,” said Dr. Brennan Spiegel, senior author of the study and director of health services research at Cedars-Sinai, said in a statement. “But that doesn’t mean they can’t.”

The study found that remote patient monitoring with biosensors had no statistically significant impact on any of six clinical outcomes studied: body mass index, weight, waist circumference, body fat percentage, systolic and diastolic blood pressure. The analysis found that these devices did show early promise in improving outcomes for certain conditions, including obstructive pulmonary disease, Parkinson’s disease, hypertension and low back pain.

“There is a big difference between using these sensors to track sleep for self-betterment and using them make medical decisions,” said Michelle Keller, co-author and a clinical research specialist at the Cedars-Sinai Center for Outcomes Research and Education, in a statement.

Investigators did a statistical analysis and in-depth literature review of 27 studies from 13 countries published between January 2000 and October 2016. Each study examined the effects of remote patient monitoring using wearable biosensors including physical activity trackers, blood pressure monitors, electrocardiograms, electronic weight scales, accelerometers and pulse oximeters. The interventions targeted patients who were overweight or suffering from heart disease, lung disease, chronic pain, stroke, or Parkinson’s.

A statistical analysis of the relevant literature revealed that remote patient monitoring resulted in no significant impact on any of the reported clinical outcomes.

DORTMUND, Germany – Many mHealth apps do not provide adequate security when transmitting data, according to a study published recently in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. Researchers at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Germany tested 53 of the most downloaded free mHealth apps for data transport issues, with 40% of the apps failing the test. Private information was leaked from 18 of the apps and 17 used unprotected connections. “Insufficient transport security can lead to confidentiality issues for patients and medical professionals, as well as safety issues regarding data integrity,” wrote the study’s authors. “mHealth apps should therefore deploy intensified vigilance to protect their data and integrity.”

MUNICH – A wrist-worn device is able to capture natural sleep characteristics over long periods of time, according to researchers who published their work in a recent issue of Current Biology. Professors Till Roenneberg and Dr. Eva Winnebeck of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München used small and inexpensive actimeters to study the dynamics of sleep phases in more than 16,000 sleep bouts from 593 experimental subjects between the ages of 8 and 92. “Our simple algorithms can be applied to thousands of activity measurements that already exist throughout the world and on many more yet to come,” said Roenneberg in the study. “Such large and diverse datasets will pave the way for important new insights into sleep physiology and medicine that one may not be able to gain with traditional methods and sample sizes.”

NEW YORK – mHealth can encourage patients with chronic diseases to modify their behaviors, according to a recent study.

“Empowering Patients Using Smart Mobile Health Platforms: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment,” a study which combined data from a Chinese mHealth firm, as well as the Office of Chronic Disease Management in China, evaluated the potential value of technologies such as mobile health apps and mobile-enabled EHRs, and the importance of mHealth platform design, in achieving better health care outcomes.

“By assisting patients with behavior modification and disease self-management, mHealth platforms have tremendous potential for improving health outcomes and reducing medical costs,” said Anindya Ghose, a co-author of a paper on the study, in a statement. “With this research, companies have an opportunity to better understand patients’ interaction with mHealth technology and design elements that will be most effective for patient adoption and engagement.”

Analyzing almost 10,000 unique responses from diabetes patients over 15 months, the study revealed: Patients who adopt the mHealth platform see more than a 2000% reduction, on average, in glucose levels over time. They also show an average 327% reduction in hospital visits and 799% reduction in medical expenses.

Other findings from the study: Mobility is key to patients’ self-management success; and platform design is critical to achieving better health outcomes.

CHICAGO – Photos taken by parents with a smartphone can be a reliable way to get an accurate dermatologic diagnosis for children’s skin conditions, according to a study recently published in JAMA Dermatology. “Parent-provided smartphone photographs are typically of sufficient quality to permit accurate diagnosis of pediatric skin conditions,” the authors said in the JAMA article on the study. The study was conducted with 40 pairs of parents-patients with half of the pairs receiving a simple, three-step instruction sheet on how best to take photographs using a smartphone and the other half not receiving the instructions. Agreement between smartphone photo diagnosis and in-person diagnosis was 83%, the researchers said.

WALTHAM, Mass. – When providers used the Hospital-to-Home module of Glytec’s eGlycemic Management System to guide insulin regimens prescribed at discharge, patients had no diabetes-related readmissions, urgent care visits or emergency department visits within the first 30 days, according to a study led by Eastern Virginia Medical School and presented at the recent 17th Annual Diabetes Technology Meeting. “For patients with diabetes, laying a foundation for optimal recovery and well-being following hospitalization means we need to give appropriate consideration to insulin regimens prescribed at discharge,” said Dr. Jagdeesh Ullal, the study’s principal investigator, in a statement. “The study suggests that an evidence-based software solution like Glytec’s can help overcome this inertia and be of great value.”

NEW YORK – Virtual care solutions provider AMC Health has been selected as the telemonitoring provider for HealthPartners Institute’s continuing high blood pressure study, Hyperlink. Previous phases of the Hyperlink study have shown positive results for home telemonitoring of hypertension. Recently, HealthPartners was awarded $6 million from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute for the expansion of the study to include a larger sampling of patients. In the second phase of research, AMC Health and HealthPartners will work together to monitor patients’ blood pressure from home, along with a direct link to pharmacists or nurse practitioners. The monitoring, in addition to regular doctor visits, will determine if telemonitoring can improve a patient’s health and decrease blood pressure more than traditional clinic-based care. AMC Health will provide patients with in-home devices to measure their blood pressure and data will be sent through AMC’s CareConsole clinical platform into the HealthPartners electronic medical record. “Our study will show whether telehealth improves hypertension care for patients who are enrolled directly from a real-world primary care setting,” said Dr. Karen Margolis of HealthPartners in a statement.

SAN FRANCISCO – Fitbit has been selected as the first wearable for use in the national All of Us research program established by the White House in 2015. All of Us seeks to enroll 1 million or more participants to accelerate research that may improve the ability to prevent and treat disease based on individual characteristics. Researchers will use data gathered from the program to learn more about how individual differences in lifestyle, environment and biological makeup can influence health and disease. The project is funded by an award from the National Institutes of Health to The Scripps Research Institute. As a subset of the All of Us program, the STSI leads The Participant Center, a unit tasked with enrolling and engaging diverse populations across the country. Through this network, STSI will provide up to 10,000 Fitbit devices to a representative sample of All of Us volunteers for a one-year study. At the end of the study, the researchers will provide recommendations on how the devices could be more broadly incorporated into the All of Us research program. The study will also generate a data set to explore the relationship between health indicators such as physical activity, heart rate and sleep in conjunction with other health outcomes that will be captured as part of All of Us. “As part of the global shift towards precision medicine, wearable data has the potential to inform highly personalized healthcare,” said Adam Pellegrini, General Manager of Fitbit Health Solutions, in a statement. “Through this historic initiative, we will be able to see the role that Fitbit data can play on the path to better understanding how individualization can help to prevent and treat disease.”